chance

When we last checked in on one of Sandvine’s traffic studies, Netflix had just edged past BitTorrent as the largest source of internet traffic in North America while YouTube was still a small-timer. A year has made quite the difference. Netflix is up to 28.8 percent in a new study, while YouTube has moved up to second place with 13.1 percent and demands even more than ordinary web requests. Rivals like Hulu don’t register in the top 10, and YouTube is by far the ruler of mobile with nearly 31 percent of smartphone traffic headed its way. Overall usage is moving up rapidly, no matter what kind of network the continent uses — the typical North American chews up 659MB per month when mobile and a hefty 51GB through a landline. There’s little reason to dispute worries of the impact on bandwidth-strained internet providers, although we suspect most would disagree with Sandvine on what’s to be done. The company naturally sees the study as a chance for business with carriers wanting to curb usage or charge extra through its tools; a generation that grew up with internet access, however, would likely see it as a better excuse to roll out more capacity for all those streaming videos.

Silver’s post is broken down into two parts. The first is a technical discussion of how Gallup fits into his own model (which still gives Obama a 70% chance of winning the election). The second part talks about Gallup’s reliability.

The basic gist is two fold. One, when Gallup is far apart form other polls, Gallup is usually wrong. The second is that Gallup’s history of Presidential tracking is very odd, and prone to huge swings that don’t show up in the results of other pollsters.

Here are a few examples he cites:

In 2008, Gallup put Obama 11 points ahead of McCain on election eve. Other polls averaged an Obama lead of 7 points. The other polls were correct.

Ars Technica reports that Pearson targeted a single page from 2007 that was using copyrighted material. Some form of miscommunication ensued, though, as EduBlogs, the host of the blog in question, found that all of its 1.45 million sites were taken down.

EduBlogs insists it was never given the chance to solve the problem itself—rather, the blogs were taken down by the overarching provider ServerBeach, to whom EduBlogs is a client. The whole problem was sorted in around 60 minutes, but that’s not really the point: rather, it highlights how dumb DMCA notices are and how badly they work. [Ars Technica]

We got hints from an early Geekbench result that the iPhone 5 was going to be flying. It seems that Apple’s really has worked some magic, both with iOS 6 and its custom silicon, to make the iPhone 5 absolutely blazing at crunching Javascript. Browsing on the iPhone 5 is going to be lightning quick.

AnandTech managed to grab an iPhone 5 review sample to run some quick SunSpider Javascript benchmark tests, and well, you can see for yourself below. Not only does the iPhone 5 destroy Android’s best, but it beats Intel’s Atom chips too.

A couple of caveats here, though. This browser test uses the default browser on each platform, so those of you using Chrome on Android could see faster results (let us know in the comments if you get a chance to run it). According to Intel, as this kind of processing relies heavily on the memory interface of the SoCs, its Atom could easily best chips based on the Cortex A9 spec because of memory speed issues. It seems Apple’s custom silicon has removed these kinds of memory problems, making the iPhone 5 the fastest mobile Javascript cruncher ever seen.

Hopefully the rest of the system is absolutely blazing too, because no one likes to wait around for things to happen. We all suffer from hourglass syndrome, right? [AnandTech]

We got hints from an early Geekbench result that the iPhone 5 was going to be flying. It seems that Apple’s really has worked some magic, both with iOS 6 and its custom silicon, to make the iPhone 5 absolutely blazing at crunching Javascript. Browsing on the iPhone 5 is going to be lightning quick.

AnandTech managed to grab an iPhone 5 review sample to run some quick SunSpider Javascript benchmark tests, and well, you can see for yourself below. Not only does the iPhone 5 destroy Android’s best, but it beats Intel’s Atom chips too.

A couple of caveats here, though. This browser test uses the default browser on each platform, so those of you using Chrome on Android could see faster results (let us know in the comments if you get a chance to run it). According to Intel, as this kind of processing relies heavily on the memory interface of the SoCs, its Atom could easily best chips based on the Cortex A9 spec because of memory speed issues. It seems Apple’s custom silicon has removed these kinds of memory problems, making the iPhone 5 the fastest mobile Javascript cruncher ever seen.

Hopefully the rest of the system is absolutely blazing too, because no one likes to wait around for things to happen. We all suffer from hourglass syndrome, right? [AnandTech]

We got hints from an early Geekbench result that the iPhone 5 was going to be flying. It seems that Apple’s really has worked some magic, both with iOS 6 and its custom silicon, to make the iPhone 5 absolutely blazing at crunching Javascript. Browsing on the iPhone 5 is going to be lightning quick.

AnandTech managed to grab an iPhone 5 review sample to run some quick SunSpider Javascript benchmark tests, and well, you can see for yourself below. Not only does the iPhone 5 destroy Android’s best, but it beats Intel’s Atom chips too.

A couple of caveats here, though. This browser test uses the default browser on each platform, so those of you using Chrome on Android could see faster results (let us know in the comments if you get a chance to run it). According to Intel, as this kind of processing relies heavily on the memory interface of the SoCs, its Atom could easily best chips based on the Cortex A9 spec because of memory speed issues. It seems Apple’s custom silicon has removed these kinds of memory problems, making the iPhone 5 the fastest mobile Javascript cruncher ever seen.

Hopefully the rest of the system is absolutely blazing too, because no one likes to wait around for things to happen. We all suffer from hourglass syndrome, right? [AnandTech]

So the Attorney General and the six companies win for looking aware and concerned about online privacy, and the privacy zealots get to rest a little easier before going off on their next crusade. (Probably against Google.)

Plus, apps makers now all have to hire lawyers to write up these privacy policies and interns to put the policies online and build links to them in their apps. Which increases employment!

Professor registration for the 2012 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) is now open. GOMC is a global online marketing competition open to professors and their students in any higher education institution. Professors sign up for the contest and then serve as guides and mentors to their student participants throughout the competition. Over the course of three weeks, student teams are tasked with developing and running a successful online advertising campaign for real businesses or nonprofit organizations using Google AdWords. In the process, they sharpen their advertising, consulting and data analysis skills. (Note: student registration will open on January 31, 2012 and students can only enter if their professors have signed up already and must sign up under their own professors).

After running their online advertising campaign for three weeks, students summarize their experiences in campaign reports, which they submit online. Based on the performance of the campaigns and the quality of the reports, Googlers on the GOMC team and a panel of independent academics select the winning teams.

The global winners and their professor will receive a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The regional winners (and their professor) will win a trip to local Google offices, and the social impact award winners will be able to make donations to nonprofit organizations that were part of the GOMC competition.

Last year’s challenge had 50,000 participants representing 100 countries, and this year we expect even more. For more information, visit www.google.com/onlinechallenge. Professors, here is a chance to help your students sharpen their marketing skills and make a global impact!

The firm says that sales of those devices will reach 12 million in 2011, with Apple TV shipping 4 million.

In other words, Microsoft sold more Xboxes in a single week than Apple sells in an average quarter. And Apple is the market leader in that “connected TV players” space. At least when you ignore game consoles.

This isn’t to pick on Apple. It’s simply to point out that Microsoft’s “Trojan horse” strategy with the Xbox has worked amazingly well.

And this was absolutely part of Microsoft’s strategy from the beginning — way back in 2005 before the Xbox 360 launched, Microsoft executives were talking about trying to expand the market beyond hardcore video gamers and turn it into a more general-purpose entertainment device. But Microsoft always knew it had to make a top-notch game console first to get the installed base, then add entertainment features over time.

It’s been doing that, quietly, for more than five years now and has sold almost 60 million Xboxes in the process. With the addition of a whole bunch of TV and other video content last week, the strategy has finally reached full fruition.

Apple, Google, and other connected TV companies could still have a chance if they team up with TV makers so the software is built into your new television set. But any company who hopes to compete with the Xbox by selling an add-on box that DOESN’T play games is in a deep state of denial.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.